Nforce 4 build issues

[Tavoc]

I built two computers this weekend for some friends, one based on the MSI neo 4 Platinum and one based on the ASUS A8N SLI deluxe. For the most part, the computers work great, but both of them have the same minor problems:


Issue 1: SATA Hard Drive appears as removable drive in Windows XP. It looks just like I put in a USB drive (same icon on the system tray). It doesnt appear to cause any performance issues, but it is annoying, and I am not sure why it is doing it. I thought at first it might have something to do with SATA drivers, but Windows installed fine, and the drives run fine except for the icon in the system tray. Both Harddrives were Seagate 160GB SATA drives, one with NCQ the other without.

Issue 2: I could not, for the life of me, get either computer to work with a floppy drive. Seperate boards, seperate brands of Floppy drives, and neither would work. The cables were done correctly (I have checked about 20 times) and the BIOS recognizes the drives, but they just wont read any disks. Last time I checked it floppys dont require any drivers or additional attention.


Thanks for any advice you might have

 

[BentValve]

Did you install the most recent SATA drivers via floppy when installing XP? I thought 137gb was the max HDD size for XP.


If your positive your cables were installed correctly then I have to think the disc you were using was bad.

 

[NiKeFiDO]

doesnt SP2 fix the max HS size?

 

[biostud]

1. SATA's are AFAIK supposed to be hot-plugable, therefor the removable drive icon.
2. Floppies can be really annoying. What happens if you set floppy as primary boot and you put in a floppy? does it halt and ask for a boot disk?

 

[Tavoc]

1)I am using Windows XP SP2 in both cases, so it automatically recognizes the drives as 160 GB. It also seemed to have no problem fortmatting or installing on either drive. I am thinking that this is indeed the product of them being hot swappable. The ASUS board actually came with a breakout plate that allows you to connect external SATA drives. So maybe this is a feature?

2) I am about 99 percent sure that they are cabled correctly, they both had power, and both would actually try to access the floppy inside. Cabling them in any other configuration would result in an error on post. I used multiple floppy disks to test, and then tested them on my own comp where they worked fine. I am at work right now, but I will try to test the boot order when I get home.

Thanks for the responses, I am intrested to see if anyone else has had these problems.

 

[dunkster]

Issue 2 is perhaps due to installing the Nvidia chipset IDE/ATAPI driver.

Go to Device Manager, IDE/ATAPI controller, Driver and select 'Rollback'. Roll the driver back to standard Windows IDE/ATAPI driver. Don't attempt to 'uninstall' the Nvidia IDE driver - just roll back to standard Windows IDE/ATAPI controller.

Can't help with issue 1.

Hope this helps!

 

[biostud]

1) Yes, it's a feature, not a fault.

 

[Tavoc]

Thanks for the idea dunkster, I will try that when I get home.

I guess the other question I have is why havent the other SATA drives I own appeared as removable drives in Windows XP. Is it Service Pack 2 that triggers this, or is it something to do with the Nvidia drivers or the Nforce 4 chipset. I noticed on the Microsoft knowledgebase that drives could show up as removable drives as a byproduct of some wireless configuration utility, but the fix they provided did not work for me.